With the first quarter of 2021 out of the way, it's time for many to look back on their progress made thus far, and it's no different for the group behind Ryujinx, the Nintendo Switch emulator. The team has neatly detailed their achievements made in the past few months, and the overall progress made on Patreon tier goals. There's an absolute wealth of documentation to go through, as the developers have made numerous changes and improvements, with the most notable summarized below.

The first topic of discussion is Bravely Default II, which released back in February, and in the time between then and now, the game's performance has made an impressive leap, being unplayable on launch, to being in nearly perfect playable status as of now. A handful of promised features have also been added recently, from amiibo emulation--which is just about finished and nearly fully compatible--to adding a Vulkan GPU backend for private testers and set to be extended to the public sometime in April, and reaching a new patron goal of over $1,500 a month, which means the addition of ARB Shaders and better performance on Nvidia graphics cards is achievable.

Amiibo Emulation - merged into the main build on 3/18/21.
While compatibility is now almost perfect, there are still some improvements to come for Amiibo which can be tracked on the associated Github issue here: https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/issues/2122

Custom User Profiles - in progress. Some prerequisites have been established; there should be big news on this soon!

Vulkan GPU Backend - in progress, ETA April 2021 for public testing. See further below for a more in-depth report on the progress of this feature.

$1500/month - ARB Shaders - Almost there!

ARB shaders will further reduce stuttering on first-run by improving the shader compilation speed on NVIDIA GPUs using the OpenGL API.

$2500/month - One full-time developer - Not yet met

This amount of monthly donations will allow the project's founder, gdkchan, to work full-time on developing Ryujinx.

Another important milestone is the introduction of the emulator's LDN 2.2 update. This is a specific build of Ryujinx that allows for online multiplayer, with version 2.2 adding in tons of performance boosts and stability, for games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and more, as well as support for Monster Hunter Rise.

- LDN2.2 is up-to-date as of master 1.0.6819
- Graphical fixes for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
- Texture swap fixes on Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate.
- Stability improvements in Super Smash Bros. ultimate.
- Missing menu text fixed in Splatoon 2.
- Logic bug fixed in Super Bomberman R.
- Color accuracy improvements on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Splatoon 2, and others.
The following PRs were added into LDN2.2:
- Add support for HLE macros and accelerate MultiOrawElementsIndirectCount.
- PPTC meets ExeFS Patching.
- Performance tweaks for Pokemon Sword & Shield and Monster Hunter Rise are included.

With all this progress, it looks like Ryujinx is better than never before. If you're interested in the full changelog of additions and changes--be forewarned, it's a veritable novel--you can check it out in the source below, or you can grab the latest build of the emulator, also available on their official site.

Source
Download

 

[Kurt91]

I'm pretty happy that Ryujinx is getting improvements like this. I tried playing Crash Team Racing on Yuzu for the longest damned time, and it would freeze every single time at the autosave-explanation screen until very recently. Ryujinx would load the game, but with a bit of slowdown. Not enough to be an issue gameplay-wise, but every sound effect was stuttery and broken. Once Yuzu started to load the game, it was just slightly better, but with similar sound issues.

The performance improvements might just be enough to make the game playable, audio's a big dealbreaker for me. Besides, I saw a video on the update, and apparently you can upscale the game pretty well with minimal performance hit. The guy doing the video has a better PC than I do admittedly (though mine isn't too bad, I can play VR with it well enough), but he was cranking it up to 4K and only losing a couple frames, still getting better performance than standard resolution in the previous build he had been using.

 

[D34DL1N3R]

It's sad you need jailbreak Switch for to use this emulator on PC.

Ummmmm. No.

 

[lordelan]

I donno if this is stupid of me to say but I've been following both switch emus since the start and I could never understand why they don't do the development together. One goal, two teams so faster, better results. That said, yuzu is running Odyssey and other hard to run games on my 10 year old i5 3570 CPU so i got nothing to complain abt tbh.

It's mainly because of the language/technology. Yuzu was first. The guy behind Ryujinx just started his emu as a fun project in C# because well he wanted to do something in C#. It turned out to be a good emu just "later" and now we have those two emus.

 

[bowlofspiders]

I'm pretty happy that Ryujinx is getting improvements like this. I tried playing Crash Team Racing on Yuzu for the longest damned time, and it would freeze every single time at the autosave-explanation screen until very recently. Ryujinx would load the game, but with a bit of slowdown. Not enough to be an issue gameplay-wise, but every sound effect was stuttery and broken. Once Yuzu started to load the game, it was just slightly better, but with similar sound issues.

The performance improvements might just be enough to make the game playable, audio's a big dealbreaker for me. Besides, I saw a video on the update, and apparently you can upscale the game pretty well with minimal performance hit. The guy doing the video has a better PC than I do admittedly (though mine isn't too bad, I can play VR with it well enough), but he was cranking it up to 4K and only losing a couple frames, still getting better performance than standard resolution in the previous build he had been using.

I played through the entire story of CTR on yuzu with the 60 FPS mod a while ago. It did crash every now and then but I was able to make it through. Have you tried using an older build?

 

[Purple_Heart]

whats better Yuzu or RyujiNX?

 

[Deleted User]

I only got a gaming PC for the first time in my life summer 2020, before that I already had a Nintendo Switch. I thought Switch was pretty awesome as far as emulators and games. But after having a gaming pc, it has devalued how I think of the actual console so much. Everything's so much better on PC except actual Switch exclusives, and even that is getting better with emulation on PC.

 

[bowlofspiders]

whats better Yuzu or RyujiNX?

Depends on the games you want to play really. I use yuzu the most though there are some games Ryujinx can play that yuzu can't like 51 Clubhouse Games.

 

[BitMasterPlus]

Playing Switch games on PC without buying a Switch? I'm in! lol

 

[PikachuPrincess23]

Ummmmm. No.

What really, that's good news. So it's only with Yuzu you need jailbreak Switch?

 

[bowlofspiders]

What really, that's good news. So it's only with Yuzu you need jailbreak Switch?

You need a Switch to use both emulators unless you pirate. (except for homebrew games)

 

[PikachuPrincess23]

You need a Switch to use both emulators unless you pirate. (except for homebrew games)

So it's possible to use Nintendo switch lite with Ryujinx?

 

[bowlofspiders]

So it's possible to use Nintendo switch lite with Ryujinx?

Ryujinx and yuzu need console specific keys to run commercial games which need to come from a modded Switch. This requires an older Switch (generally 2018 or before) in order to use an exploit to get the keys. The Switch Lite and newer Mariko units need a specific modchip that is exceptionally rare to get the keys so it's not practical to use them for either emulator.

 

[thekarter104]

Yeah you can move your yuzu save data to Ryuinx without any issues.

Can you tell me how? Because it doesn't seem to work when I tried.
I did this: You know the user folder, right? In nand/user/save.
I copied it to the Ryujinx folder, also into nand/user/save, but it doesn't work. What am I doing wrong and how should it look like in Ryujinx?

 

[bowlofspiders]

Can you tell me how? Because it doesn't seem to work when I tried.
I did this: You know the user folder, right? In nand/user/save.
I copied it to the Ryujinx folder, also into nand/user/save, but it doesn't work. What am I doing wrong and how should it look like in Ryujinx?

In yuzu right click Animal Crossing and hit "Open Save Data Location."
Now in Ryujinx right click Animal Crossing and hit "Open User Save Directory."
Just move all of the files from the yuzu window that opened to the Ryujinx window that opened.

 

[GamerzHell9137]

I donno if this is stupid of me to say but I've been following both switch emus since the start and I could never understand why they don't do the development together. One goal, two teams so faster, better results. That said, yuzu is running Odyssey and other hard to run games on my 10 year old i5 3570 CPU so i got nothing to complain abt tbh.

Yuzu is written in C++, Ryujinx is written in C#.
Other things is both teams have different views on what's important and what's not.
Mixing both teams into one team would be a mess because of that.

 

[|<roni&g]

Good to see. Played mario 3d the bowser 1 but couldn't get into it so good job I didn't pick it up coz there ain't no demos of it (that I know of)

 

[raxadian]

Depends on the games you want to play really. I use yuzu the most though there are some games Ryujinx can play that yuzu can't like 51 Clubhouse Games.

There are videos comparing how a game runs on each emulator on YouTube.

 

[bowlofspiders]

There are videos comparing how a game runs on each emulator on YouTube.

This is true. It's generally better for people to try out both and see which one runs better though. Hardware differences make a huge difference with Switch emulation.

 

[thekarter104]

In yuzu right click Animal Crossing and hit "Open Save Data Location."
Now in Ryujinx right click Animal Crossing and hit "Open User Save Directory."
Just move all of the files from the yuzu window that opened to the Ryujinx window that opened.

Thanks. Haven't tried it yet since I'm on lunch break, but I have another question, sorry. I'm so noobish when it comes to Switch emulation. Do you have to have to connect your Switch via internet cable in order to play local using this?

Thanks in advance.

 

[bowlofspiders]

Thanks. Haven't tried it yet since I'm on lunch break, but I have another question, sorry. I'm so noobish when it comes to Switch emulation. Do you have to have to connect your Switch via internet cable in order to play local using this?

Thanks in advance.

I would highly suggest looking up a Youtube video for Ryujinx LDN 2.2. It will explain everything better than I can.